Noulakaz

The blog of Avinash, Christina, Anya and Kyan Meetoo.

How to reduce the amount of disk space used by the systemd journal

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We, Linux people, generally use systemd now and one of its components is the journal controlled by the journalctl command line tool.

As explained on the Arch wiki,

systemd has its own logging system called the journal. The /var/log/journal/directory is a part of the systemd package and the journal will write to /var/log/journal/

The journal is always appended and therefore grows in size. On my laptop, the journal was taking 1.8Gb of space and was full of details which, I believe, I’ll never need. So I decided to clear all old contents (which the systemd people call a vacuum). I issued:

journalctl --disk-usage
journalctl --vacuum-size=64M
journalctl --disk-usage

And the journal immediately became smaller. I then issued a

journalctl --verify

which made me realise that some of the remaining journal files were corrupted (for some reason). There is no journal repair tool in systemd so I simply removed the offending files (with rm).

Now, I can easily check my journal entries for today and I know everything will be all fine:

journalctl --since today

Classifying the most valuable football clubs in the world and what this means for Liverpool

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Today, while surfing on the Transfermarkt website, I stumbled upon their list of the most valuable football clubs in the world. What I did was simply to separate the clubs into different tiers where two clubs appear in the same tier if their values are close to one another (I used 5% as a threshold).

Interestingly, we notice the following:

  • Real Madrid is in a class of its own.
  • Then follows Barcelona but still alone in its tier.
  • The 3rd tier is interesting as it includes four clubs: Chelsea, Manchester City, Bayern and Manchester United.
  • The 4th tier consists of Juventus, Paris Saint-Germain, Arsenal, Athletico Madrid and Tottenham.
  • In the 5th tier, we find Liverpool only.

Most of these football teams apart from Chelsea, Manchester City and Paris Saint-Germain are historic clubs.

This ranking also puts in perspective the difficulty for teams other than Real Madrid or Barcelona to win the Champions League. And it also explains, of course, why Liverpool still has to invest in a few world class (expensive) players in order to consistently compete against Chelsea, the two Manchester clubs, Arsenal and Tottenham. Jurgen Klopp is right: the time is for Liverpool to buy expensive and established players who can immediately slot in and improve the team. Liverpool should not buy second rate players anymore. Of course, Klopp is also keen to integrate young players from the academy into the first team.

Interesting times ahead for Liverpool. But also, tough ones.

The 7 most important people in the Liverpool coaching staff

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Here are the 7 of the most important people in the Liverpool first-team coaching staff:

Jürgen Klopp (holding the Liverpool scarf)

Born on 16 June 1967 in Stuttgart, Germany, Jürgen became the Manager of Liverpool in October 2015. Since then, Liverpool has adopted the Gegenpressing philosophy of playing “characterized by high-intensity running and pressing, a high-line across the pitch and counter-attacking football on the break.”

And now for the others, top row first, from left to right.

Zeljko Buvac

Born on 13 September 1961 in what is now Bosnia and Herzegovina, Zeljko is the First Assistant Coach which essentially means that he is the assistant of Jürgen Klopp, who refers him as “The brain” of the backroom staff.

Peter Krawietz

Peter is the Second Assistant Coach of Liverpool. Born on 31 December 1971 in Mainz, Germany, Peter excels in scouting and match analysis. Jürgen calls him “The Eye” of his staff.

Pepijn Lijnders

Born on 24 January 1983 in Venray, Netherlands, Pepijn is the First-team Development Coach. His job is to “assist Jürgen to develop a recognisable Liverpool FC style but also give young talent the chance to develop to first-team standards.” Jürgen considers Pepijn as part of “The Brain”.

John Achterberg

John is the First-team Goalkeeping Coach of Liverpool. Born in Utrecht, Netherlands on 8 July 1971, John was a former goalkeeper. According to Jürgen, John has the ability to be “a goalkeeper coach 24 hours a day” and “if you want to talk to him about anything [other than goalkeeping], he can lead every conversation in a goalkeeping direction”.

Mona Nemmer

Born around 1985 in Germany (I couldn’t find her exact birth date…), Mona is the Head of Nutrition at Liverpool. Quoting her, “I take care of the chefs, the projects, what quality of product we are buying, which components can we put on the menus depending on whether it is matchday minus one, matchday or what can be served on the bus after a game. Then it’s about when will it be eaten and what will be the last meal before a match.” She also adds: “Some players like to cook for themselves, some like to take away a packed bag with food in, but here we like to react individually. If the player wants a cooking lesson, or their wives or girlfriends do, we are free in the sense to help them with whatever they need.” She also says: “Football is difficult sport because on the one hand it is about endurance, but on the other it is strength, so I always try to update my knowledge […]”. Jürgen says that “Mona is the Heart and Soul” of the backroom staff.

Andreas Kornmayer

Andreas is the Head of Fitness and Conditioning. Born on 21 September 1974 in Munich, Germany, Andreas is the “drill sergeant” of Liverpool according to Jürgen. “He needs to be the bad boy from time to time because players don’t like running”.

This is quite an interesting backroom team: 4 from Germany, 2 from Holland and 1 from Bosnia and Herzegovina. This is very different from previous staff which, initially, were mostly from Great Britain and then Spain.

Kind of a very precise German piece of engineering with, of course, a “cool madman” at the steering wheel. I love it.